LIMA (Reuters) – Peru’s Congress ousted President Martín Vizcarra on Monday in an impeachment vote over corruption allegations, prompting immediate tensions in the Andean nation.
Vizcarra said he would accept the Congress vote and would not take any legal action to counter it.
“Today I am leaving the presidential palace. Today I am going home,” Vizcarra said during a speech late on Monday, surrounded by his cabinet in the courtyard of the presidential residence in downtown Lima.
Head of Congress, Manuel Merino, an agronomist and businessman from the minority Popular Action, is expected to assume the presidency on Tuesday and will remain in office until the end of July 2021, when Vizcarra’s term was due to expire.
Merino called for calm after the vote and assured Peruvians that the April 11 presidential election would go on as planned.
“It is already called for,” he said about the election in an interview with the local station América Televisión.
In the second effort by lawmakers to remove the centrist Vizcarra in a matter of months, the opposition-dominated Congress put forward 105 votes to oust him over accusations that as a governor he accepted bribes from companies that won public works contracts.
The 105 votes far exceeded the 87-vote threshold out of 130 needed to remove him from office. There were 19 votes against his ouster and four abstentions.
Vizcarra has rejected the corruption allegations as “baseless” and “false.” He warned of “unpredictable consequences” earlier on Monday if lawmakers impeached him ahead of the April 11 election, in which he is not eligible to run.
